Unanswered: Did “Fake News” Actually Change Anything?

Since the election, liberals have made a million excuses for why Hillary Clinton failed to defeat Donald Trump. So embarrassed after the loss, they have looked underneath every couch cushion in America for someone or something to blame. The scapegoats (thus far) include: James Comey, Vladimir Putin, the Electoral College system, and many others.

But while Democrats have no particular favorite among their many excuses, the Media Wing of the party – i.e. the mainstream press – has narrowed the problem down to one major offender: Fake News.

The story goes like this. Because a Buzzfeed story showed that fake news items outdid the top “real” news stories on social media, Americans were tricked into voting for Donald Trump. No one exactly comes right out and says it like that, but that’s obviously what they want us to believe.

It’s not what THEY believe, of course. They’re just trying to distract the country from their own reckless approach to journalism this year – an approach that could reasonably be described as “fake,” if one were so inclined. They know they went way over the line in their assault on Trump, and they know they have trashed their collective reputations – possibly beyond repair.

No one’s arguing that fake news stories get passed around. Some of them go viral. But what does that mean? Does it mean that everyone who reads these headlines takes them as the gospel truth? Of course not. And it certainly doesn’t mean that these stories influenced the way anyone voted. Liberals aren’t passing around conservative fake news and conservatives aren’t passing around liberal fake news. These stories are just circulating around an echo chamber harmlessly.

They know that. They don’t care about some blog that tells you that Hillary Clinton is secretly a member of the Gambino crime family. They want to lump conservative news sites like Breitbart, Drudge, and this one in with the “fake news” label and start finding ways to censor any form of right-leaning online media.

The only way they can regain legitimacy is to reclaim their position as the only game in town.